Over one hundred years ago, the philosopher and novelist George Santayana warned us that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. The radical right-wing blogosphere has again demonstrated just how forgetful — and easily duped — they truly are.
The Canadian newspaper National Post published a story on 19 May 2006 entitled "Iran eyes badges for Jews". (Clicking that link will show you an empty page; the National Post has deleted the story. The text of the story has been mirrored at IranPressNews.) The story claimed that
a new law passed by the Iranian parliament… would require the country’s Jews and Christians to wear coloured badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims.
The story was picked up by several popular right-wing web sites, including Drudge Report and NewsMax. Within mere hours, the meme had infected right-wing blogs like H5N1 in a flock of Asian chickens. The predictable reaction followed: calls to nuke Iran, comparisons to the Nazis, yada yada yada. The overall import was that Iran was the Third Reich reincarnated, and that waging war upon Iran was both inevitable and righteous.
There’s just one little problem with the story: It’s not true. As documented by (among many others) Juan Cole, CBS News, historymike, and Wikipedia, no such legislation has been passed by the Iranian parliament. Hoder has posted a summary of a translation of the original text of the bill, and it contains no mention of “badges” for religious minorities.
Among the far-right-wing blogs that picked up the story and repeated it uncritically were:
- Atlas Shrugs: IRAN: Jews, Christians Must Wear "Special Badges"
- Barking Moonbat Early Warning System: Those Who Forget The Past …
- Euphoric Reality: Iran’s New Dress Code
- Ogre’s Politics and Views : History Repeats
- Right on the Right: True Islamofascism in Iran
- Stop The ACLU: Iran Wants Jews and Christians To Wear Targets
- The Wide Awakes: Iran To Require Non-Muslim Insignia?
As of this writing (21 May 2006 15:02:52 UTC), none of these blogs have seen fit to issue a retraction. Atlas Shrugs has explicitly refused to retract the fib, even though she knows the story is false.
You’ll note that a couple of these even allude to the Santayana quote at the start of this post. So, what was it that these gullible folks have forgotten? Simply this: We’ve been sold a war on the basis of lies before. In Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton explain how the first Gulf War was marketed to the American people by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, with the help of an anonymous witness who claimed to have seen Iraqi troops stealing incubators from Kuwaiti hospitals, leaving Kuwaiti babies behind to die. No attempt was made at the time to verify the young woman’s story, and it turned out after the war that the tale had been a complete fabrication.
The point, of course, is not that only far-right-wing bloggers will spread falsehoods in this way. The susceptibility to propaganda is a human trait, and is not unique to the right side of the political spectrum. But the rabid rightwingers in this country have already made up their minds that we must go to war with Iran. They do not care to make a rational case for this view, but they will happily and uncritically swallow any feeble excuse for a justification that comes along, whether it has a basis in fact or not.
Ironically, another post at The Wide Awakes may have summed up this fiasco best:
The great thing about free speech is that it makes it easy to identify who those idiots are.
UPDATE 05/22/06 06:10 EDT: Justin H has published a retraction of his story at Right on the Right. Of course, the original post is unchanged as of this writing. It wouldn’t do to have anyone see the retraction on the same page as the false claims about Iran. That’s what Justin calls “journalistic integrity”. Pfeh.
UPDATE 05/25/06 06:01 EDT: Juan Cole notes that the National Post has finally retracted the story. And Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo points us to an excellent article in Jewish Week that examines how the story got published and then fell apart.
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May 21st, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Capt. Rational
I spotted this stuff on Stop the ACLU a few days ago, and it sounded like hooey to me. I watched in horror as it spread across the web, so I did a little Google News search on it and found that the only sources carrying the story were right-wing and Christian publications and a few sites in Israel.
I won’t hold my breath waiting for the hundreds of retractions their readers deserve.
May 21st, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Dixie
My uncle used to send me forwarded political email in the conservative vein. After I sent him the debunking (via Snopes or a legitimate news site) for the first three of them, he responded to the third with “Yeah, ok, it’s not true, but wouldn’t it be great if it was?”
He took me off his mailing list when I replied to his fourth with a debunking link and the message that I was thinking of starting a blog called “Easily Debunked Equals Lying.” He still mails such things to my mother, though, since she simply deletes them without challenge.
RealTeen, unfortunately, is amassing quite a record of ignoring his previous wrong posts and editing/deleting comments while claiming lack of moderation or spam-clearing mistakes. His youth makes this behavior more disturbing to me. As I look at the current circumstances of former College Republicans, I wonder if the newest crop is a field of such weeds.
May 21st, 2006 at 5:51 pm
kender
May 21st, 2006 at 9:15 pm
Robert Serrano
Yes retraction. It’s what ethical people (hell any people who want to maintain any claim on credibility) do when when they publish something based on falsehoods. Refusal to retract such falsehoods makes you a party to the lie, rather than the victim of it.
Or is all of this going COMPLETELY over your little head, kender?
May 22nd, 2006 at 7:35 pm
cao
OK…perhaps the ‘badges” part of it is wrong…
But what is the text of the actual law in question?
Is it that Christians and Jews must wear different colored clothing so that Islamists don’t defile themselves by touching them by accident?
That is my question. Because if that’s the text of the legislation, then…this word game you’re playing us a dangerous one and very misleading.
The Iranian law in question would reportedly mean that 25,000 Jews would have to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the front of their clothes, while Christians would be required to wear red badges. Zoroastrians would have to wear a blue cloth, Canada’s National Post reported.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations said it was “deeply disturbed by reports indicating that the Iranian Parliament (Majlis) may be in the process of adopting” the law.
“While such legislation would be reminiscent of dark periods in the past, like the Nazi era when Jews and others had to wear identifying badges, it is also consistent with the racist and extremist ideology propagated by President Ahmadinejad,” the Conference of Presidents stated.
“This is part of legislation, originally introduced in 2004 but blocked within the Majlis, mandating that Iranians wear standard Islamic garments. We have been seeking to clarify these reports but do not yet have confirmation,” the Conference of Presidents stated, adding that Iran could be working on such uniforms to be introduced in the fall.
“We are monitoring the situation and seeking to ascertain the facts in order to determine the appropriate response. The initial reports have aroused concern in many governmental and non-governmental circles. We are confident that the facts will be clear soon and we will comment further at that time,” the Conference of Presidents concluded.
You expect that CBS and all the others you listed there are telling the truth? This defies reason….which again has me wondering about your cognitive reasoning skills in addition to such problems as perseveration and echlalia. You just keep repeating the same memes without sufficient evidence to back it up!
The majority of the media in America is overwhelmingly biased to the left and they distort the “news” and the “facts” that American see every single day, and we have to sift through that garbage if we’re going to get down to the real story.
*The New York Times has not endorsed a single Republican presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower in the ‘50’s.
*On the major networks, conservatives fill slots as the “token” conservative commentators on Sunday morning talk shows, but liberals are hired as anchors and hosts to deliver hard, “objective” news.
*As none other than the Bostn Globe explained, 2005 “was a year of good-byes-
some noble, some less so-as journalism’s old guard departed from the spotlight. And it was a year when some of media’s biggest institutions started thinking, in earnest, about reinvention.” Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel and Tom Brokaw are all gone now, with Rather booted from the air thanks to Rathergate. Even New YorkTimes reporter Judith Miller was forced to resign to dislose her source in the Valerie Plame affair (though MIller obviously got the last laugh with her reported million-dollar book advance).*The United States is fighting a war in Iraq and elsewhere against terrorists who want Western Civilization destroyed. Terrorists perpetrated 9/11, slaughtered innocents, and beheaded American Nick Berg on video. yet the mainstream media can’t run enough stories against America’s war in Iraq. June 29, 2004, the New York Times ran more than fifty front-page news stories about American soldiers “mistreating” Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. By contrast, the Chicago Tribune, no bastion of conservative thought, twenty-eight. Why did the NYT feel the need to go overoard about a few bad apple soldiers in an American military force of over two million?
*Of the 1,388 stories on the Iraq war aired on the evening news programs of ABC, CBS and NBS during the first nine months of 2005, 61 percent of the stories were negative or pessimistic, whil only 15 percent of the stories were positive or optimistic.
*Mainstream media giants such as the NYT, the Boston Globe and Knight Ridder are LAYING OFF employees.
*Eighty-nine percent of the Washington bureau chiefs and reporteers voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 while only 7 percent voted for Bush.
*A study tracking for two years in the late 2990s showed how the media reports on gun issues. The study found that of the 653 gun-policy stories broadcast, 357 stories tilted in favor of gun control while a mere thirty-six tilted AGAINST gun control. That’s an anti-gun bias of 10-1.
I don’t need to go on, the point’s been made and you cranks are off your rockers by nit picking at stuff like this.
Get a life.
Sláinte, Cao
May 22nd, 2006 at 8:11 pm
meatbrain
Did you read the summary of the bill that I linked to?
No?
Did you bother to ask a native Arabic speaker to translate the original text of the bill for you?
No?
It’s obviously very important to you to protect your ignorance at all costs.
Tell me something, Cao. Can you find that original story on the National Post site now?
No? Why not?
Have you bothered to read the National Post’s retraction?
No? Why not?
I know why. You have to protect your ignorance.
May 22nd, 2006 at 8:13 pm
cao
And uh…need I remind you that Iran’s current leadership consists of anti-American and anti-Israel lunatics who realistically should be viewed as EXTREMELY DANGEROUS LIARS?
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a former member of Iran’s secret police and publicly denies the Holocaust.
Just like some of his American contemporaries. (e.g., Joseph Massad, or Hamid Dabashi, or Nicholas Dirks, Jean Howard, Farah Jasmine Griffin, et al.) who speak the language of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Are you one of those, meatball?
Are you a holocaust denier?
Are you one of those people who says Israel has no right to exist and supports the the children and young men of the stones and Molotov cocktails?
Even putting all that stuff aside about the media’s truthtelling, you have to admit that anything that comes out of Ahmadinejad’s mouth or his mouthpieces (e.g., the government he is now running) should be subject to question.
Why is it that you people don’t seem to acknowledge that the terrorists we’re fighting think that war = deception? And believe everything they say as though it’s the truth?
Are you really that stupid?
Guess so, that’s why I have such difficulty mustering the wherewithal to come over here and debate you. You have no coherent talking points; it’s all regurgitated pablum from other places that I’ve already heard before. Quite frankly, meatball, it’s BORING!
Come up with something new. Puhleez.
Sláinte, Cao
May 22nd, 2006 at 8:18 pm
meatbrain
Didn’t read the summary or the bill itself, did you?
Suddenly realized your source has issued a retraction, huh?
And now you’re desperate to change the subject with another ad hominem attack, eh?
Protect that ignorance, Cao. It’s all that stands between you and the real world.
And you fall back — again — on a nebulous, non-specific accusation. What specific lies is Iran’s leadership telling the world, in the present case of the alleged religious-badge law?
May 22nd, 2006 at 9:42 pm
Dixie
I don’t get it at all. If I were on the witness stand and testified to ten criminal acts by the defendant, then the defendant’s attorney could prove that I was not telling the truth on just one of the accusations in my testimony, I’m impeached. The jury has the right to disregard every bit of my testimony. The case against the defendant would be damaged.
Why, then, would a blog owner wanting to make a case against Iran open him/herself to having every opinion or linked story viewed with skepticism? Why not admit to jumping the gun, to saying that no matter what other untruths are out there, s/he is not going to defend (by argument or silence) this particular untruth?
My uncle would wish that the story were true, but at least he would admit that it was not.
And should it come true in the future? It still doesn’t make the current story the truth. That would be like the passenger in the car claiming that he’d precisely timed the traffic light change after he’d said “Now…..Now…....Now…..Now. See? I called it!”
(I hope RealTeen will go back and provide an update link to his retraction. I believe he has it in him.)
May 22nd, 2006 at 11:59 pm
Dixie
Oh, by the way—
Cao wrote, “Even New YorkTimes reporter Judith Miller was forced to resign to dislose [sic] her source in the Valerie Plame affair (though MIller obviously got the last laugh with her reported million-dollar book advance).”
Wouldn’t the update be Valerie’s $2.5 mil last laugh?
May 23rd, 2006 at 6:32 am
meatbrain
I think there may be a basic misconception at work here. Justin H at RightontheRight.com, Cao, and other hyper-rightists are entirely uninterested in any sort of fact-based discussion. Witness Cao’s refusal to read the summary of the recently-passed Iranian law, or find a translation of the original bill. Witness her attempt to brand me a Holocaust denier without the slightest evidence to back up her smear.
Cao and her ilk are spreading propaganda that will support their efforts to drive the US into a war against Iran. Propaganda need not be based in fact; it is far more effective if it is based on emotion. That is why the front page of the National Post on May 19 displayed a huge photo of two Jews in Budapest wearing yellow stars on their coats. The whole point of the exercise was to link Iran to the Holocaust on an emotional level, in an attempt to shut down all fact-based discussion of the rationale for war.
Facts do not matter to war-lovers like Cao and her kind. Only the spread of hatred and fear matter to them. There are those who are easily swayed by such tactics, and facts will never reach them. But that does not mean that the facts should be ignored. The best response I can think of to fearmongers like Cao is to point out the disconnect between their hysterics and the facts.
May 26th, 2006 at 10:50 am
Gitardood
What do you guys suggest we do about Iran and others like them? I’m curious. If they really are not trying to get nukes, ok. What do we do, give them the technology for nulear power? Will that make them like us? If they really don’t think Israel should be “wiped off the face of the earth”, ok, what do we do, wait to see what happens? What do we do if it does happen? If they really don’t want to target non-Muslims, ok, what next? Should we extend a helping hand? I’m being serious.
Should we attempt to be friends with a country that has a president who publicly hates America and everything it stands for? Will that solve our problem? Is there anything we can do (other than give them money, which we know doesn’t work) to make Iran and other America-hating countries want to coexist with us?
Could we have prevented 9/11? If so, how? Can we prevent another 9/11 or worse? If so, how should we go about doing so? Should we set aside our differences with Iran and let them do whatever it is they plan on doing and hope for the best? Should we “wait” and stay on the defensive?
Is it worth a few thousand people to see if they “really” are going to attack anyone? Or is it worth a few thousand people to attack them? Seems either way we’re damned if we do and possibly damned if we don’t. [Fool me once (9/11) shame on you, fool me twice shame on me].
With the appeasement of the left and the war mongering of the right, is there a soulution? Has there ever been peace without war? These are serious questions. The right wants war (Do they really?) and the left wants to appease (Is that true?).